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October 30, 2004

Oddest book I own: John Mitchel's The Female Pilgrim; Or, the Travels of Hephzibah. Under the Similitude of a Dream... (1800) (a knock-off of the Pilgrim's Progress, first published in the mid-18th c.).

Oddest question I ask on a regular basis: "Must you act like a cat?" ("Well, yes, actually," respond the cats, understandably puzzled.)

Oddest habit: Pacing while I think.

Oddest habit that I don't think is odd: I walk everywhere (including the two miles to the nearest big grocery store, often enough).

Oddest item of clothing I've owned: My first winter coat, which was an iridescent maroon with green undertones. No, not a fashion statement--but it was on sale. (For a reason, I suspect.)

Oddest film I've seen: The cult film Apple Pie (1976). [C-3PO] Oh, dear. [/C-3PO] (Although I've got to say that, given the rest of the film, the dance sequence at the end came surprisingly close to genuine competence.)

Oddest comment I've written on a student paper: Arrrrgggh!

Oddest comment I received while an undergraduate: "Pretty lousy exam." (The score was 99 out of 100. I've always liked that comment...)

Oddest beginning to a question on one of my exams: "So, these three characters walk into a bar..."

Oddest thing in my office: An original poster for the film version of 1776.

Oddest thing I've done in class: Stretched out on the table and pretended to go to sleep (imitating my students, who were not exactly lively that day).

Oddest website I visit on a regular basis: the Internet Movie Database (not because the site is odd, but because I really don't like movies very much!).

Oddest thing I've purchased: a little TV, which I bought with my first paycheck when I was 17 years old (not because little TVs are odd, but because I really don't like TV very much, either...).

Oddest accomplishment: winning a state-wide Academic Decathlon gold medal for an essay about walking around in the CSU Long Beach library.

In honor of Halloween, I pulled twocollections of Bram Stoker's short fiction off the shelf. Dracula may be ubiquitous in contemporary Victorian studies--the editor of one journal told me that they were receiving more submissions on that novel than on any other--but I've never had much enthusiasm for it; while its narrative structure is undoubtedly complex, its prose nevertheless strikes me as overwrought and, in general, overdone. Shorter Stoker, however, does have something to recommend it. Like many Victorian horror writers, Stoker relies heavily on the clash between rational observers and irrational happenings, with the latter often destroying the former; if the supernatural gives way, it does so not to reason, but to Christian faith (as in "The Chain of Destiny"). Two comic stories are remarkably "modern" in their subjects: "A Criminal Star" gleefully sends up the cult of celebrity, while "Crooken Sands" takes aim at the "invented tradition" of the Scottish tartan. In both stories, the horrors (or narrowly averted horrors) derive from human egotism instead of the supernatural. As Henry Irving's manager, Stoker spent a good deal of time in America, and Americans pop up in a number of stories--most gruesomely in the vaguely Poesque "The Squaw," featuring a black cat who takes revenge on the American who accidentally kills her kitten. The genuinely "eeeuugh"-inducing ending features an Iron Maiden. ("The Squaw" refers simultaneously to an Indian woman who revenges herself horribly on the killer of her child, the cat, and the Iron Maiden itself.) "Midnight Tales," an incomplete sequence of short-shorts, ends on a note of macabre humor that wouldn't seem out of place in something by Edward Gorey. Although it's only intermittently successful, "The Secret of the Growing Gold" uses the same device--a man haunted by a spurned woman's hair--later deployed to great effect in the "Black Hair" episode of the classic Japanese horror film Kwaidan (based on the short stories of Lafcadio Hearn). Far spookier is "The Judge's House," which nevertheless seems dangerously close in subject and execution to J. S. LeFanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street." (Then again, it's quite possible that Stoker intends us to recognize the similarities; certainly, this time around, the outcome is not so happy for the protagonist.)

By far the best story, however, is "The Dualitists; or, the Death Doom of the Double Born," which in tone is reminiscent of--wait for it--Damon Runyon's "Sense of Humor." Yes, that Damon Runyon. "Sense of Humor" derives its bite from the contrast between the narrator's wryly detached tone and Joe the Joker's increasingly dangerous "humor"; the story's payoff packs a genuinely sharp punch, precisely because the narrator never wavers in his attitude to Joe's behavior. Similarly, "The Dualitists," written in engagingly mock-heroic mode ("All the poets from Hyginus to Schiller might sing of noble deeds done and desperate dangers held as naught for friendship's sake, but they would have been mute had they but known of the mutual affection of Harry and Tommy"), tells the story of two young psychopaths with murderously inappropriate comic verve. After Ephraim Bubb accidentally murders his own children in an attempt to save them from the depradations of Harry and Tommy, both he and his wife inadvertently die when they try to catch the corpses:

But the weight of the bodies and the height from which they fell were not reckoned by either parent, and from being ignorant of a simple dynamical formula each tried to effect an object which calm, common sense, united with scientific knowledge, would have told them was impossible. The masses fell, and Ephraim and Sophonisba were stricken dead by the falling twins, who were thus posthumously guilty of the crime of parricide.

The narrator's calm reflections on physics, the need for "common sense," and, of course, justice, intrude at just the right moment. It's a wonderful example of black humor, and shows a far greater sense of style than anything in Dracula.

October 29, 2004

J. M. Callwell, A Champion of the Faith: A Tale of Prince Hal and the Lollards (Blackie, n.d.). Sir John Oldcastle and company. (With a hilariously inappropriate cover, incidentally, showing late Victorian boys in sailor garb!)

October 27, 2004

My mother has decided that my book is appropriate bedtime reading. "This means that it's putting you to sleep?" I inquired, with understandable trepidation. Well, no, apparently: she has already made it through the introduction and the first chapter. (This is no mean feat, as my mother is not an especially fast reader, and the first chapter is fairly long.) But I'm intrigued by her sense of my academic prose style, which she describes as "chatty." "You put yourself in the book," she told me a couple of nights ago, by which she meant that I make occasional humorous asides--I think I make an exasperated remark somewhere in there about the sheer dreadfulness of a line of verse--and refer to myself in the first person. This startled me a bit. While I tried to de-dissertationize the prose as much as possible, mostly by stripping out wayward jargon and shifting sentences out of dreary passive voice, it still looks to me like standard academic language. Certainly, I don't think I do anything to match the startling juxtapositions of formal and colloquial language that you find in British academic prose--Simon Goldhill's Who Needs Greek? is a fine recent example.

October 25, 2004

It's a rare event indeed when one of my students worries that I've given her a grade that's too high. ("No, really, I meant to give you that 'A.' Honest.")

Perhaps it's just me, but when an academic "help desk" sends an e-mail that begins with "U" instead of "You," isn't it cause for at least moderate concern?

This bibliographical essay has certainly been helpful when it comes to figuring out which publishers do no copyediting whatsoever.

My undergraduates like Bleak House! Hooray!

My freshmen like Alias Grace! Hooray! (Actually, I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying Alias Grace this time around; I'm not a big Atwood fan and wasn't all that impressed by this novel when it first came out, but it seems to have grown on me.)

'Tis the season for chocolate, which has been appearing in the department at mysterious intervals and ruining everyone's diet. Which reminds me: I need to buy Halloween candy tomorrow.

October 24, 2004

Starting next week, some of my colleagues will be dropping in on the Bibliography course to discuss their respective lines of work. One of the paradoxes of a terminal MA program like ours is that students are asked to be simultaneously generalists (that is, they are expected to see their coursework in terms of broad historical coverage) and specialists (that is, they are expected to write an MA thesis on a tightly-defined topic). We've spent a fair amount of time this semester discussing the process of formulating a topic and choosing a director, and in most cases the possible topic arises not from any interest in a broad field, but from more practical issues. With whom has the student already worked? Which papers could stand further elaboration and revision? Some students, however, have genuine passions of one sort or another; I've already provisionally agreed to work with one woman, not just because her project sounds interesting, but more importantly because it clearly energizes her. It's exciting.

I usually warn students against applying to doctoral programs because of its strengths in field X. Yes, field X may look appealing now, but it may not look so appealing once you discover that you don't get along with the faculty in it, or (horrors) once you discover that the faculty have all decided to resign en masse. Moreover, intellectual interests flourish and wilt in unpredictable ways. I've run across or heard of people who started as medievalists and wound up as Romanticists, or who went in determined to specialize in the English Renaissance and came out with degrees in twentieth-century American fiction. Then again, though, I'm the poster child for stubbornness. I decided on Victorian literature in high school and never budged an inch when it came to my primary specialization, although I also wound up moving backwards for my secondary fields (which run from 1660-1832). But why Victorian?

As a result, when I later came to read Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the rest, they never seemed strange to me--after all, I grew up on both their sentiments and the basic elements of their aesthetics. I think it's telling that many of my undergraduates have never encountered, say, Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales or Kipling's Just So Stories; for them, Victorian prose reads like some bizarre thicket of endless sentences and equally endless paragraphs, dotted with inexplicable punctuation. But I always feel a sense of intellectual and emotional homecoming whenever I pick up a Victorian novel. The style feels right, somehow. While my research interests--historical fiction, literature and religion--are very much a product of my later education, my love of the Victorians (and the nineteenth century more generally) can't be separated from my original passion for Little Women, all those years ago.

October 23, 2004

DtEHoGRE: I was just reading "The Little Professor." You're getting really good at informal writing.
ME: Oh?
DtEHoGRE: Yes. I can understand almost everything you say now.
ME: Well, that's good to know...

October 22, 2004

Religious Tracts Dispersed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, vol. II (Rivington, 1827). Fifteen tracts on the catechism, confirmation, and baptism. One of a ten-volume set.

John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, ed. James Tolhurst (Notre Dame, 2002). Sermons on Catholic doctrine, first delivered in Birmingham in 1849. Part of Notre Dame's new edition of Newman's complete works.

Angela Carter, Saints and Strangers (Penguin, 1986). American history meets Carter's unique brand of fantasy. I confess that I've read very little of Carter's work, aside from her collection The Bloody Chamber--must get around to remedying the situation.

Charles Palliser, The Quincunx (Ballantine, 1989). Massive neo-Victorian conspiracy novel. This is a replacement copy, actually; haven't the slightest clue what I did with the first one. You'd think it would be hard to misplace a novel this hefty.

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Borzoi, 2004). A daughter discovers the truth about her father's work as a prison guard in Haiti.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Talese, 2003). The last man (?) reminisces in a post-apocalyptic world.

Emile Zola, The Conquest of Passans (Sutton, 1994). Rougon-Macquart #4. There's a helpful guide (in French) to the characters here (or try the directory available at Gutenberg). See also Les Rougon Macquart.

---, Doctor Pascal (Sutton, 1989). Rougon-Macquart #20.

Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Ohio, 2000). Biography plus letters of the late-Victorian Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist, now best known for her (in)famous response to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Reuben Sachs.

October 20, 2004

As an undergraduate, I devoured Joyce Carol Oates' novels every chance I could get. A decade on, I find that my enthusiasm has waned to a near-vanishing point, and The Tattooed Girl perhaps explains why. All of Oates' favorite themes and technical tricks are here: the long, breathy sentences alternating with short, terse paragraphs; long lists of objects and events, all tumbling over each other; physical and mental breakdowns of some sort; sometimes inexplicably twisted psyches; obsessive behaviors; mundanely nightmarish atmospheres. This relatively short novel takes on a number of very big themes, including the irrationality of anti-Semitism, the ethics of Holocaust fiction (and, by extension, of imaginative writing itself), the weight of history and memory, and the collapse of personal identity. The title character, Alma, is a mysterious, sexually abused, and anti-Semitic woman who passes for a teenager; she is both physically repulsive and bizarrely alluring. Her counterpart is Joshua Seigl, ailing author of a bestselling Holocaust novel. Both Alma and her pimp/lover Dmitri (another anti-Semite) think that Joshua is Jewish--but, in fact, only his father was a Jew. Joshua, who hires Alma as an assistant, finds himself experiencing feelings of desire, paternal protectiveness, and revulsion, sometimes at the same time, while Alma first loathes him (in company with Dmitri) and then adores him (once Dmitri fades from the picture). As with so many of Oates' novels, Joshua and Alma are drawn together because both are irreparably broken; there's no hope for either love or redemption here.

While I was reading, the word that kept creeping into my head was..."facile." Oates doesn't seem particularly comfortable imagining her way into the heads of anti-Semites, which means that despite the back cover blurb's boast that she "probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire," the probing doesn't get far below the epidermis. Dmitri and Alma have opinions that seem drawn from a mishmash of the Protocols, Holocaust revisionism, Christian anti-Judaism, and just garden-variety xenophobia; they are, to put it mildly, stereotypical in their mode of stereotyping. While both characters clearly use "the Jews" as a convenient way of organizing the world's evils, Oates never gets much into the whys and wherefores.

Similarly, while Oates gestures at the debates surrounding the production of Holocaust fiction, she skates over what such debates might imply for fiction more generally. Alma finds the very concept of fiction revolting:

"Alma, I think of myself as writing stories for others. In place of others who are dead, or mute. Who can't speak for themselves."
"But you don't know. You write like you know and you don't know."
"I know what I've been told, and what I can imagine. I know what I, myself, have felt. "
Alma said, disgusted, "You're stealing from them. Some people you didn't even know. And other prisoners in 'D-Dash--'"
"'Dachau.'"
"--in that place, you're pretending you were there with them."
Somehow, this seemed to Alma the most repulsive act of all.
"You made 'Dash-aw' up, too, didn't you! You made it all up! You pretended you were there, and you weren't. It's all lies." (252)

Joshua sees fiction as a form of imaginative ventriloquism, motivated by the need to restore a "voice" to those who have been silenced. (This position will sound familiar to anyone who has read some of the recent scholarship on Holocaust fiction.) His self-justification, while in and of itself unexceptionable, nevertheless sounds inauspiciously subjective: he may be writing for others, but he certainly refers to "I" quite a bit. Alma, meanwhile, balks at Joshua's claim that imagination can produce truth; she identifies witnessing with reportage. For her, experiences are concrete in their particularity--an experience is a thing that belongs to one person. If an author imagines your experience, that is, you lose instead of gain. Given how intensely the novel identifies Alma's identity with her body, it's not surprising that she imagines memory in materialist terms. Nevertheless, her position rules not only Holocaust fiction but also historical fiction and even fiction per se out of court.

To a certain extent, the narrative suggests that Joshua's fiction was, if not misguided, at least not written for the reasons he claims; in a drug haze, he admits that "I couldn't tell the truth. They tried to buy their way out--to deny that they were Jews. I lied for them!" (273) Joshua, who can barely stand up under the weight of his own past, writes a novel that is, in effect, revisionist myth: unable to face his ancestors' survival tactic, he makes them stick to their identity guns instead. In one sense, Alma is, paradoxically enough, correct. His "lies" benefit himself instead of his ancestors: he appropriates their experiences in order to lighten the historical burden for himself. (There's an immediate parallel in his sister, Jet, who keeps trying to speak for Joshua--with ultimately unfortunate consequences for Alma.) Given the number of literal and metaphorical crematoria in this novel, one has to wonder to what extent we're supposed to see Joshua reenacting Judaism's obliteration. But--and here's the problem--this revelation allows Oates to sidestep the metafictional questions raised by Alma's anger. To what extent can any author escape Joshua's position, even with the best intentions? Is there an "ethical imagination," so to speak? Now, like Dan Green, I don't think Oates needs to be in the business of offering solutions to Big Questions--that's not something fiction is equipped for or even good at, as far as I can tell--but if she's going to bring up these questions and then propose local solutions, shouldn't she then face their larger implications for her own work? After all, aren't there ethical issues involved in her own publisher's claims for the novel's purpose? For this reader, at least, the facile intellectual quality I mentioned produced an unpleasant aesthetic effect--a kind of half-woven tapestry.

October 19, 2004

Now that I'm back, allow me to call your attention to the new British Fiction 1800-1829 database. All sorts of fascinating bibliographical data, including information about advertisements and reviews. (Via VICTORIA.)